1940-12-26 — Page 3

DONALD DUCK

UNCA DONALD, DID GEORGE WASHINGTON

GET LICKED FOR CUTTING

DOWN THE

CHERRY TREE?

WHY NO, BOYS! GEORGE TOLD THE TRUTH, SO HIS DAD LET

HIM OFF!

BUZZ-Z-

Z-Z-Z

Thursday,

HONGKONG TELEGRAPH

IF WE DID THAT

WOULD

WHY,

WELL, THEN

YOU SPANK NO. OF

US

COURSE NOT!

WE

IF WE 'FESSED UP?

CONFESS!

December 26, 1940. Ubrary, Supreme Couf!

By Walt Disney

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| MAGAZINE PAGE

Miracle of our

CITIZEN

I

HAVE seen beyond any

doubt the reason why Britain will never be suc- cessfully invaded.

I write that sentence with confidence..

Each night, for the past three weeks, I have gone out with one unit or other of the Home Guard in every sort of place-from Devon to Scotland, from the front-line counties of the Channel coast to the great industrial cities of the North.

And in those three weeks I have seen the greatness of Britain in an emergency expressed as I believe it has never been expressed before.

I saw a whole nation dropping, every sectional difference and uniting in defence.

Behind every country hedge I found men patrol- ling, armed and ready should the invader come -anxious, to tell the truth, that he should come, that they could take a part in ending this war.

-Across every open space" and moorland I found men watching, never relaxing from the alert; and in the cities, the factories, the mine-fields, the shipyards, a great legion of men drill- ing, mustering, mounting guard, preparing.

AMAZING

The Government itself, surely, must have been amazed at the response to its call for a Home Guard -1,300,000 men in some two months before the recruiting list. was closed.

A vast army in a score of days-unpaid, yet all the keener for that, many of them veterans of one great war, all of them clamouring to be allowed to serve.

The whole history of the world has never produced an army like it. I know that the professional soldiers were amazed, for several of them

told me so.

"After the last war," said one of them, "we grew to think that Britain had changed and there would never be an- other generation like ours.

"Then came Dunkirk to prove that the young men were finer than ever. And after that the call to defend England at home, and wo knew with gladness that all the nation was sound.

"I have seen many armies and quite a lot of fighting. I have never seen men so keen and so determined."

MISTAKES

There have, of course, boon mistakes. Nothing so quick-

ARMY

Dudley Barker

(sums up his inspection of the Home Guard

ly organised could have es- caped them.

It was a mistake to organisc defence units in factories, pits, workshops and such separately from

main

the body of the Home Guard and to say that those units would fight only inside their own . wails.

The Home Guard that de- fenda the town defends all the factories in it-senseless to wait till the enemy is at the machines before employing all your force against him.

This division of forces has not worked well in practice, and it should be changed.

It was a mistake to appoint some of the present commun- ders.

In my journey I came across some who are swollen with a

little local power, insist on

military ranka and martinct discipline, and miss the whole spirit of the Home Guard, which is that of a body of free men equal in status, arming to defend their homes,

There are some few coni-

manders-who-are-making

this

question of rank a sort of personal issue, setting them- solves up as little local Caesars.

There are not many of them, and they are not all ex-soldiers. They are them- selves guilty of insubordina- tion, since they are flatly dis- obeying the Army Council's instructions. They should be dismissed at once.

There are other comman- ders, so lacking in imagination that the only training they give their men is a carbon copy of old-fashioned military discipline (route marches, forming fours, church parades).

"That sort of thing en- courages the men," said one of them.

The Home Guardsmen who do civilian jobs all day have insufficient time for the neces- sary training and none to spare for route marches and forming fours. They can go to church as civilians if they wish, without putting on a uniform to do so.

I actually found one unit being taught ceremonial drill and slow marching.

"But that's fine," said a staff officer of one of the Com- mands. "That will teach them discipline and they'll fight bet- ter. Look at the Guards."

· NONSENSE All nonsense.

The Home Guard will never fight like the Guards. In a pitched battle they will never be more than second-class troops.

But train them the right way, as the unofficial instruc- tors from the International · Brigade train them at Oster- ley Park, and in guerilla fight. ing and they'll show' aven tho Guards a thing or too.

The Home Guardsmen are Individuals and they cannot

be hammered into a machine. But they fire great dividuals.

in-

If you are a Home Guards- man you know how keen and determined your own little unit is. Belleve me, the spirit is the same throughout the land, in field and factory alike, on city square and village

green.

The spirit of the Home Guard is something very pre- cious for Britain, and only danger threatens it. If Hitler does not invade before winter boredom might.

KEEP IT UP

As dark evenings curtail training and no parachutists descend, the Home Guard will begin to feel that after all their efforts were for nothing and the danger against which they were mobilised has not come to pass.

Interest may slacken. That must not happen.

We cannot afford to lose the Home Guard enthusiasm that put new hearts in all the people

when things wero blackest and may even per- haps be the decisive factor in averting invasion altogether.

That enthusiasm must be kept up by every device of training and fellowship.

THE REAL JOB-

Above all, I believe, the en-

FUNNY SIDE UP

By Abner Dean

Cope. It by based’phataru mynewal, Ino,

176

DEAN

"Remember Number 763927...well, that's his son!"

'Breadbasket'

Wins

for

Fame Molotov

thusiasm of the Home Guard M. MOLOTOV, Premler and Foreign Commissar of Russia,

can

best be preserved by stressing to them the real job that awaits them.

They were formed to round up parachutista, but that is not to be their end. A great role lies ahead,

When in the coming sum- mers the regular armies go overseas to drive the Nazis homes the safety of Britain will be entrusted to

the Home Guard within her own shores.

Tell them that, tell them to fit themselves for that, and their enthusiasm will not abate.

More Savings Are Needed

Lord Stamp's View

The view that there were cer- tain features in the financial situation on which some satis- faction was justified was cx- pressed by Lord Stamp at a Bristol War Weapons Week Luncheon.

The onset of inflation had been held back, he said, and the rise in prices was not much more than could be accounted for by increased real costs in shipping risks, A.R.P. and other war expenditure. Neverthe- Iess the point of inflation was just round the corner.

has now achieved a niche in history.

Not because in his own country he is hailed as the genius of the Soviet pacts with Germany, Finland and the Baltic States, but because, like Maxim and Mills, his name is linked with a weapon of war-the "Molotov Breadbasket."

It is extremely unlikely that Molotov had anything to do with the "breadbaskets"-a container for one H.E. bomb and a number of incendiaries first used by the Russians against the Finns-but it is a story he

t

will never be able to destroy.

* OTHERS who have given their names to engines of war really set out to invent them.

Sir Hiram Maxim, an Anglo- American, invented the first truly automatic machine gun in 1889.

Usually any compilented revo- lutionary device starts in a small way and is developed slowly over A number of years.

out bullets

But the first Maxim, water- Jacketed and fed by belts of 250 rounds of ammunition, smacked rounds a minute.

nt more than 600

Many years passed before this was substantially increased.

TSAAC NEWTON LEWIS, who

died in 1031, hnd retired from the United States Army with the rank of colonel when he invented lls famous gun.

In 1913 most of the European Powers gave trial orders, but our experts reported against the gun. Room For Improvement Just before the war of 1914, Saying that there was considerable however, Britain ordered five, at room for Improvement in savings, £175 each. Lord Stamp stated that there were The price came down with suc wide differences between the contel-salve orders, and by the end of butions of various places, which the war British contracts for the showed that where the spirit was guns totalled £13,000,000, keen bigger

results could ablained,

be The Lewis gun is still immensely valuable as a light anti-alrernit gun.

"There is a lower rale per head in the larger towns of over 100,000 inhabitants than in the smaller ones." he noted, "and there are indications that the places suffering heavy air rald attacks have been slackening off less per head in their savings than. others. This seems to show that a sense of danger stimulates action."

NE of the most widely used "nemed" war, Inventions was undoubtedly the Mills bomb, a handy device like small metal ninehonie, of which the Allies used 75,000,000 between 1914 and 1918.

By J. D. S. ALAN

The inventor was the late Str William Mills, the famous engl neer, who after the war received

£27,000 for it.

Also well known in. the trenches of the last war was the Hale rute grenade.

This was a vicious little bomb screwed on a rod and discharged from an ordinary rite.

They were not fired from the shoulder, but with the butt of rise resting on the ground.

it was invented by the late Frederick Marten Hale, who had 210 war patents to his name, and who received a Government award of £22,000.

*

O-DAY, when our guns throw high explosive shells at Ger- man bombers, nine people in ten call the fragments of the shells "shrapnel."

They are wrong, but they are commemorating great British artillery offleer.

Henry Shrapnel, # Willshire man, entered the Army in 1779, and invented a shell which threw forward, after the burst, a shower of marble-like bullets,

The great Wellington found It valuable, and urged generous re- ward.

Sir George Wood, the duke's artillery adviser, said it saved the battle of Waterloo, Generals and adeirola testled to its success in many compaigns.

But Shrapnel, on getting a pen- alon of £1,200 a year, was super- seded in the ordinary line of promotion and, died an embittered. man, declaring that he would have boen better off had he made no inventions.

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